Winner, 2018 PEN/E.O. Wilson Prize for Literary Science Writing Short-listed for the 2018 Wellcome Book Prize A Top 10 Science Book of Fall 2017, Publishers Weekly A Best History Book of 2017, The Guardian “Warning: She spares no detail!” –Erik Larson, bestselling author of Dead Wake In The Butchering Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery … Art, the historian Lindsey Fitzharris reveals the shocking world of nineteenth-century surgery and shows how it was transformed by advances made in germ theory and antiseptics between 1860 and 1875. She conjures up early operating theaters–no place for the squeamish–and surgeons, who, working before anesthesia, were lauded for their speed and brute strength. These pioneers knew that the aftermath of surgery was often more dangerous than patients’ afflictions, and they were baffled by the persistent infections that kept mortality rates stubbornly high. At a time when surgery couldn’t have been more hazardous, an unlikely figure stepped forward: a young, melancholy Quaker surgeon named Joseph Lister, who would solve the riddle and change the course of history.
Fitzharris dramatically reconstructs Lister’s career path to his audacious claim that germs were the source of all infection and could be countered by a sterilizing agent applied to wounds. She introduces us to Lister’s contemporaries–some of them brilliant, some outright criminal–and leads us through the grimy schools and squalid hospitals where they learned their art, the dead houses where they studied, and the cemeteries they ransacked for cadavers.
Eerie and illuminating, The Butchering Art celebrates the triumph of a visionary surgeon whose quest to unite science and medicine delivered us into the modern world.
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5 stars – I loved it!
“Surviving the knife was only half the battle.”
In The Butchering Art, Lindsey Fitzharris takes us through the shocking world of 19th century surgery. This book follows the life of Joseph Lister, a surgeon who changed the world of medicine forever with his discovery of antiseptics to prevent infection. He pioneered the way for germ theory in a time when this was considered unbelievable and ridiculous.
This book was fascinating. Fitzharris took us on a detailed journey through Lister’s life as a surgeon and his extensive experiments to save his patients. Lister was a determined man who spent his life working to uncover the causes of infection and the best ways to prevent them. He never settled for one method. He constantly was revamping his process to perfect it. His drive to constantly standardize and perfect his work forever changed the history of surgery. If he hadn’t been this determined, surgery would have never progressed to the stage it is now.
His determination to prevent infection also saved other aspects of the medical world, such as large hospitals. Before his method started to gain popularity, the death rates in hospitals were extremely high due to how filthy and crowded they were. It had gotten so bad that discussions were being made about shutting down large hospitals and returning to home care or small pop up clinics. But Lister’s determination to progress surgery and teach antiseptics changed that and saved large hospitals.
“Lister’s methods transformed surgery from a butchering art to a modern science, one where newly tried and tested methodologies trumped hackneyed practices. They opened up new frontiers in medicine—allowing us to delve further into the living body—and in the process they saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
Lister was a fascinating man who spent his life dedicated to helping his patients heal from their infliction. While he had to deal with frequent negativity when he first introduced this practice, he refused to let it prevent him from teaching and preaching about his discoveries. Because of his determination to teach about antiseptics and sterile surgery his work slowly spread and gained popularity until it became a standard in hospitals and surgery. The medical world would have been a very different place if it wasn’t for Joseph Lister and his determination to educate his fellows, and the public, about antiseptics.
Trigger Warnings:
– Very detailed descriptions of 19th century surgery
– Detailed descriptions of wounds and injuries
– Experimentation of animals
– Frequent death
The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine, is a fascinating history and biography of Victorian surgeon and scientist Joseph Lister. It’s a timely read:
“As Lister’s methods evolved, skeptics characterized these constant modifications as admissions on his part that the original system did not work. They didn’t see these adjustments as part of the natural progression of a scientific process.”
Compare that with the pushback Dr. Anthony Fauci and others receive because they changed their initial recommendation on wearing masks to protect yourself and those around you from COVID-19. It reminds me that the more things change, the more they (sadly) stay the same.
You might think this is the wrong book to read in the midst of a pandemic, but on the contrary, I found it made me feel better to read of how what we now accept as best practices in medicine were once met with stiff opposition, just as vaccines, social distancing and mask wearing are being met with stiff and ignorant opposition. We’ll get past this, thanks to the scientists, health care professionals and researchers who refuse to back down in the face of dogmatic and dangerous foes.
This is the real story of medicine and surgery from about 1850 to 1900. If you have an interest in the beginnings of how modern medicine and surgery evolved into what it is today you should read this incredible book. Lindsey Fitzharris has a PhD in the history of science and medicine from Oxford and draws from her expertise to tell the amazing story of Joseph Lister. Fitzharris pulls no punches describing the gruesome and barbaric world of medicine in the mid 1800’s. If you had the misfortune to be admitted to a hospital the odds were long that you’d ever leave, it was a death sentence. The book opens with a prologue describing the first surgery in London done with anesthesia (ether) in 1846, not that long ago. Prior to that it was a shot of whiskey and a bullet to bite on. I’m an orthopedic surgeon and I freak out about sterility and sterile technique in my operating room every time I enter it. It was mind blowing to me to learn of the obstacles Lister had to overcome to get his aseptic theories accepted by the international medical communities. To think that physicians thought disease was transmitted by air (miasma) and kept wounds covered with soiled bandages for days and weeks to “protect the tissues” from exposure is astounding. I was stunned to realize that surgeons in the late 1800’s thought pus was a natural part of the healing process. Fitzharris’s description of the filth and squalor in and about urban hospitals when Lister starts his career sets the stage for the amazing transformation that occurs once his principals are understood and accepted. Her narrative unfolds almost as a mystery novel as Lister gets closer and closer to figuring out was is actually causing infection and how to prevent it. This is a well-told fascinating tale. It you are involved in the field of medicine I urge you to read it and, since we will all be patients at some time or another during our lives the general public would benefit from being aware of Lister’s genius and the debt we owe him.
Not for the faint of heart, but an enormously educational and entertaining book. Fitzharris paints a gut-wrenching and disgusting picture of early medical practices and conditions through the 1800s and the men who fought – mostly against the rest of the medical community – to bring sound science, compassion, and even “common sense” (note the quotes) into the dark world of medical surgery.
To most, like myself, learning of the practices, thinking, and conditions that pervaded these realms up until the VERY recent past will come as a nauseating shock – yet impossible to put down. Part history, part science journal, part horror novel – The Butchering Art is an amazing read.
Started good. Then soooo much history made it very dry reading. I didn’t finish the book.
Read and be glad you were not born before about 1920
Medicine has come a very long way since the Civil War. Makes me glad I wasn’t born in 1880! Hard to imagine all the friends and family who would be dead now if not for the hard-won advances in surgery and medicine in general. This was well-written and I learned more details than I already knew. Good reading.
If you don’t mind gore it’s an interesting book!
Amazing insight to how medical science has progressed with very graphic descriptions of the horrors of treatment but 100 years ago
A compilation of stories that show how medicine, especially surgery, evolved in the 19th century. The stories are fascinating and difficult, for those of us living in the age of effective anesthesia, to believe. The suffering that our predecessors were relegated to accepting is clearly elucidated here with stories both inspirational and harrowing.
The author occasionally lapses into hagiography with her protagonist and presents him as a lone warrior against a savage tide. The practice, structure, and organization of medicine during the time described was dominated by outsized personalities who were seldom moved by science. There remains much to be learned today from this story as to how medicines different factions can continue to hold back progress to the detriment of patients.
This is a fascinating book. I little bit grisly but full of interesting bits of information. The melding of science and medicine for the first time via Joseph Lister and his antisepsis program changed surgery from an almost guaranteed death to a real chance to survive. Great stuff. Including tidbits of history like Listerine being named after Lister.
Interesting book.
If you are interested in the history of the medical sciences this book is clear, informative and interesting.
Such a fascinating but true story with insights as to the how and why surgery morphed from what it was to what it is.
This is an amazing, interesting, spellbinding biography of Lister and his search for what caused deaths before antibiotics. The author grabs your attention and never yields. I loved it.